Simply Living Hardly Thinking

We had a lovely republic day. We celebrated it with chocolates and great food cooked by lot of housewives. The chocolate stall was handled by Geetika and she did a fabulous job of explaining everybody how to make chocolates and we had some extremely creative versions of chocolates

1. Crispy corn flakes chocolate

2. Mint Chocolate made using Polo

3. Coffee Chocolate

If you need the recipes, you just need to write to me.

Besides that we had an innovative cooking competition where 17 housewives participated with amazing enthusiasm. They cooked some amazing dishes. Our customers voted and Mrs Pacheesiya from Mantri Paradise emerged to be a clear winner. She made a Mix Veg ( Au Gratin Style). Second prize was won by Shaloo Agrawal and the third by Yukti from Mantri Paradise. Our sincere thanks to all the cooks as well as everybody who helped us manage the event.

Some photos to ensure that you don’t miss it next time.

I don’t know how to write recipes the traditional way so my style will be more conversational. If you are looking for ingredients, time to cook, preparation method type of sections, I am sorry. Cooking is not a industrial process but an art. Something which you got to do with love, affection and passion.

I have a different take on making Stuffed Capsicum. The traditional way of making gravy based capsicum I guess makes you forget capsicum completely. I strongly believe that the key ingredients should stand out in whatever you cook instead of hiding their taste and aroma.

Take big capsicums and take out the bottom part which has all the seeds. Don’t throw it away but keep it aside. For the stuffing you have many options. One key ingredient is boiled potatoes and you can miz it with different things. You can add grated Paneer to it or you can add grated vegetables like Gobhi, Carrot etc. Use boiled potatoes as a base and mix some more vegies along with it. Obviously you got to add some  salt and you can add a little bit of mango powder also to this. Another interesting flavor you can add to the stuffing is by roasting some Jeera ( Cumin seeds ) on a tawa and adding it. I do not favour adding any oil to the stuffing as we will be using oil at a different place. One thing you should not forget is that add the seeds you took out of capsicum in the first step to the stuffing. This is what will ensure that the taste of capsicum stays with your dish.

Now fill up the capsicums with the stuffing and stuff it real hard so that you do not leave any space inside. Now you have two options. If you have a oven at home you can just put a little oil on top of these capsicum and bake them or the other option is to slice them and put them on a non stick Tawa. Fry it for around 10 minutes with little oil. Cover the tawa with a lid for faster cooking. You can put a little bit of oil on the tawa with cumin seeds on tawa before you put the capsicum. The cumin seeds will get embedded in the stuffing and taste great.

Before you serve you can decorate it using some cashew, onions and carrots. The sliced Stuffed capsicum can be served as a starter as well as a dry subzi.